The Wrong Passport
A Jewish woman is applying for a European passport to escape Israel. An Israeli filmmaker already had one. Europe threw him out anyway.
I’m at a café in Florentin, a Tel Aviv neighborhood just north of Jaffa, with a friend. At the next table, a woman hears my friend mention London and leans into our conversation. She takes a sip of her iced coffee. “I can’t wait to get out of here,” she says. She is a filmmaker, blond and blue-eyed, the kind of face a passport office never asks twice about. Her grandparents survived the Holocaust, she tells us. She has filed for Hungarian citizenship through her grandfather and cannot wait to leave this country. She means Israel. She hates it.
I should say where my life meets this discussion. I live in London now. I moved for my husband, and we both know how our story ends, with the two of us back in Israel, because I have given almost every waking hour of my adult life to defending that country and the people in it. So I am a table away from a Jewish woman whose grandparents outran Europe, listening to her plan her own escape into Europe to get away from the Jewish state. I let her talk. I have learned more from that one sentence than from any argument I could have picked in response.
Most of the Israelis packing boxes this year are not her. They leave because they are tired in a way that has no bottom, the kind of tired where a child cannot sleep through another siren, and a family whose hostage only recently came home cannot bear to hear one more. None of them believes a European passport will make them loved. The calculation gets run at the kitchen table, and the guilt gets carried onto the plane. Most still love the country they are leaving. This is not about them.
Criticizing Israeli leaders is not betrayal. I do it publicly, at real cost. Ben Gvir frightens me. So do the settler outposts. A man can love a country and sometimes be ashamed of the people running it. Arguably, only a man who loves his country would feel that shame so acutely.
Criticism should come from love. But for some Israelis, it seems to come from a desire for acceptance abroad. That formulation has all but collapsed since October 7th.
Take what happened this week in Marseille. Nadav Lapid is one of Israel’s most decorated directors and one of its most ferocious critics. He has lived in France since 2021. His films take Israeli society apart, with no mercy and no exit. At Cannes last year, he described his country’s response to Gaza as a collective blindness, an illness in the body of the nation. His characters call the state a sickness.
He took a little money from the Israel Film Fund and used it to indict the hand that signed the check. If the boycott movement was ever going to spare one Israeli, a man who agrees with most of its premises and says so fluently in French, it would have been him.
It did not spare him. He was invited to sit on the jury at a film festival in Marseille. Around ten directors pulled their films in protest. Not over anything he had made. Over the fact that he is Israeli. He stepped aside to save the festival from embarrassment, and then asked, in print, the question a lot of Israelis on the left are quietly asking themselves right now: what is it they actually want from me?
